DRIVEN BY FEAR:
WHY SOME BROOKLYN YOUTH
CARRY GUNS
amsterdamnews.com
“All these systems are basically failing these kids.”
That’s how Elise White of the Center for Justice Innovation (CJI) summarizes the structural failings that underlie the high rates of gun violence in New York’s historically under-supported neighborhoods.
White, who is the CJI’s director of action research, has become very familiar with the impact of these inequities. She and her colleagues have spent the past five years conducting research on gun-carrying practices among young people living in these neighborhoods.
CJI recently published its second study on this topic, “‘Two Battlefields’: ‘Opps,’ Cops, and New York City Youth Gun Culture,” which examined the reasons why Black boys and young men in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood carry firearms.
The study’s name derives from one participant’s description of the dual fears of interpersonal and state violence that the researchers found drove gun-carrying. “It’s like we got to get a gun to protect us from the opps [opposition]. Now we got to protect us from the cops, too, so it’s two battlefields,” he said, according to the researchers.
The research builds on the findings of CJI’s 2020 study, “Gotta Make Your Own Heaven,” which explored gun-carrying practices of Black and Latinx youth living in Brownsville, Brooklyn, Morrisania, the Bronx, and East Harlem in Manhattan. It is also part of a national project, with similar research wrapping up in Wilmington, Delaware; Detroit, Michigan; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
In total, the study drew from anonymous interviews of 103 participants—primarily Black men—from ages 15 through 24 who said they had carried a gun in the past year (at the time of data collection). CJI Community Research Coordinators Basaime Spate and Javonte Alexander served as the study’s primary interviewers. Both Spate and Alexander have experienced the impacts of gun violence first-hand: As teenagers, they became involved in the street networks (gangs and more informal crews) of Crown Heights.
Originally from New Jersey, Spate said he spent his childhood in foster care, and eventually moved to Florida. He left the system at around 15 and joined a street network instead.
“[I] got real deep involved in that because it treated me more like a family,” he said.
He then moved up the coast until he settled in New York. He built a new life through the branch of his street network in Crown Heights. There, he met and befriended Alexander, who grew up in the neighborhood.
Both became involved with Save our Streets (SOS) Crown Heights, one of the CJI’s demonstration projects, which employs credible messengers (those who have experience with street networks) to intervene in disputes that could turn violent, and works with high-risk individuals to help them reject violence. Alexander was one of the first participants in the program, and Spate worked there as a violence interrupter and outreach worker.
Read more here.
| 
